Chasing Chaos
by Gallos Cresendo
Summary: The story of how everything in Cyberspace gets turned on its head. New chapter will be added each week.
1. Part 1 The Scramblatron

The buzzing sound was becoming unbearable. The electricity of the usually charged and zapping atmosphere surged in outrageous pulses, uncomfortably reminding Jackie, Inez, and Matt that they were humans in a computer's world, and also that there were certain things that a computer or robot could stand that would kill a human.

As the thought occurred to Matt about what his mother would think if they got electrocuted and he didn't come home, or if she found a charred body, too broken and grotesque for a world like Cyberspace to keep, he saw the beam of the Scramblatron flare up once more. He involuntarily cringed at the sight and what he knew it was doing to Motherboard. No one had ever seen the machine in action before, but he, his friends, and probably everyone else who watched the news by now had seen the effect it could have. The Cybrary was still offline, with books and carts flying and zooming by every which way, and not to mention the poor cybrarian, Ms. Fileshare, with all six of her arms jerking spastically in random directions and her eyes perpetually rolling around in her head. _That _could at least be fixed, eventually, but that was also just a test run, and what was happening right now was no test. It was the real deal, the accumulation of the Hacker's most brutal plot to take control yet.

The sounds of a complete systems shutdown whirred below him. Motherboard couldn't take much more of this.

Meanwhile, high above him, the Hacker laughed from the comfort of his command chair at the futility of the Earth children's effort.

"What do they think they're going to _do_ down there? Smash it?" that sent him on a rollicking cackle stint, with his henchmen Buzz and Delete right at his heels. "That machine's frame is made from genuine Northern Frontier steel! You can't break that! And I just dare them to try and dismantle it under the watchful eye of the Grim Wreaker!"

"Yeah, Boss," Buzz chimed in, "There's no way those two can stop us!"

The Hacker suddenly stopped laughing. Glaring at him in the usual, terrifying homicidal fashion, he asked Buzz, "What do you mean those _two_?"

Even as Delete begun to say, "The two on the dome there," Hacker took a closer look as his large observation screen and realized his mistake.

Crawling towards his sinister invention was Matt, Inez, and nobody else.

Much to the surprised of his henchmen, a wide smile spread across his face.

"Ah, a diversion! Good one, Earth Brats, but I can do better!"

He got up out of his chair and, with a swirl of his cape, walked off, just leaving his bots with the order, "Stay here and watch the Earth Brats on the dome. If they make it to the machine, go ahead and pick them off."

It took all of his self-control just to keep from laughing as he walked all the way down the ship's corridor, threw open the door to the secondary control center, and found a Cyberspace-suited Jackie and his ex-cohort Digit standing at the panel that controlled the Scramblatron.

"Zoiks!" said Digit.

"Hacker!" said Jackie.

"That never gets old," said Hacker, "Well, maybe a little. And it's _the_ Hacker to you, missy!"

"You're too late either way!" Jackie said, "You're Scramblatron won't be able to scramble eggs in the next few seconds." With that her gloved hands once again descended to start strategically button mashing—

"Oh no you don't!"

—only to jerk away from the zap of the pale yellow ray that suddenly washed over them. Her hands immediately grabbed each other in reaction to the stinging, but then suddenly flew apart once she saw that her hands weren't actually there. Instead they were two shifting hot pink pixilated messes attached to her wrists.

"Relax," the Hacker said in response to her shriek, "It won't last long, probably no more than half an hour, but it'll be long enough for me to permanently fry your precious Motherboard's circuitry. Then, I can take control, and I will be Supreme Ruler of Cyberspace!"

Lost in his own victory delusions, he started cackling maniacally and threw up his hands, leaving his laser gun, lovingly named the Pixelator, exposed to the aerial attack of a purple cybird. Digit didn't miss his chance and dove with all the glory and rage of a fighter pilot at the weapon. The Hacker yelled in pain as the hard metal beak stabbed into his wrist, breaking the surface and leaving the wires underneath exposed, but proved to be more stubborn than Digit thought, maintaining a death grip on the gun even as Digit yanked and yanked on it, taking extreme caution not to have the barrel pointed at him for even one second.

Jackie could only switch between watching Digit and the Hacker as they twirled about the blinking lights and switches and staring at her own pixilated hands, unable even to answer as Matt's voice came in over her squakpad, "Jackie! Jackie! Motherboard's all about gone! What's going on up there? Jackie!"

Suddenly, the Pixelator went off, a direct hit at the Scramblatron's control panel.

The Hacker screamed, the first sign of real fear either Jackie or Digit had seen from him before, as the panel ceased to exist and was replaced by a shifting gray blob. He hurled Digit, along with the gun, towards Jackie and bolted out the room. As Digit slapped against the wall and slinked downwards, Matt's voice once again came through, "The Scramblatron's stopped! I think Motherboard's gonna be—Whoa!"

A beam whizzed by Matt's head. It was only one of many that were shooting haphazardly from the device without any protocol to follow. Green rays blasted every which way, searching for something to destroy from the inside out. It wouldn't be long before the machine turned on the Grim Wreaker floating in range, back on Motherboard, or even on itself.

It was mostly to prevent that third outcome why the Hacker was now having his henchmen lower him down to the machine so that he could reign it in manually or at the very least turn it off before it reached meltdown.

"Lower," he called into his own helmet, "Lower. Not that low, you miserable dunce buckets!"

In all fairness, the two dunce buckets were doing the best they could whilst panicking at all the lethal rays that were whizzing by their ship.

"What happens if we get hit?" asked Delete, "What if it hits where _we _are?"

"It won't hit us," Buzz growled, "if you help me so that the boss can fix it before it does!"

Jackie and Digit had already commandeered a cyber car to pick up Matt and Inez, artfully dodging all the straying beams. They were now in what was considered safe range watching the beams settle down as they apparently settled on a new target.

The Hacker's efforts became even more frenzied as nauseating combination of buzzing and clanking started emanating from the Scramblatron. He punched in every code and combination thereof he could think of into the emergency control keyboard, but the machine wouldn't respond.

Frustrated and desperate, he resorted to yelling. "Work! Work you insolent piece of soldered together rubbish! I've worked on you too long for you to scramble yourself!"

The machine still continued with its electronic suicide.

"Work! Work!" he began chanting in a half-sobbing voice. He continued, "Work! Work!" even as the machine began screaming in pain, making it obvious that the inevitable was inevitably near.

"It's gonna blow!" both Matt and Delete cried simultaneously.

"Take me up!" the Hacker sobbed two seconds after Buzz had begun to do so.

As he looked down upon his dying creation, he vowed the same vow he had always made to himself whenever he finally saw defeat: he _will_ rule. If not today, then the next, but he _will_ rule.

Then the Scramblatron exploded.

The Cyber Squad dodged to save their eyes from the impossibly brilliant blast. Buzz and Delete did the same. Even so, the incredible blast of white light blinded them. The thought circled around everyone's heads that this signaled the end of Cyberspace, that everything would be so shaken that the entire system would collapse in on itself and everything in it would become nothing more than a tiny twitchy blip on a computer screen.

Instantaneously the light shut off, and everything was still there, except for the Hacker.


	2. Part 2 Hacker Rebooted

"Boss!" Buzz and Delete screamed.

"Motherboard!" Jackie screamed.

The end of the arm that was holding the Hacker had been broken away completely, leaving only a metal rod with loose, sparking wires twitching at the end of it.

The Cyber Squad barely noticed that, as they saw that the top of Motherboard's protective dome was shattered, and a cyber car sized hole was now where the Scramblatron was mounted. Inez immediately came to the gut-wrenching conclusion that the evil machine had, through an unintentional method, actually done its job.

As the Squad zoomed towards the broken dome to make sure Motherboard, as well as the security of the rest of Cyberspace, was intact, the Grim Wreaker also zoomed off blindly and haphazardly, its two temporary captains scrambling to think of which way their captain was sent flying.

* * *

When everything had stopped spinning, the Hacker found that he was still floating aimlessly through the electronic cosmos, and that he was riddled with shrapnel. Fortunately, most of it was too light to mean anything except a lot of stinging and some extensive repairs once (if) his brain dead henchmen found him. He instinctively felt his face. He was happy that it was practically untouched, only to get angry once he realized that he had lost his wig.

Then he saw the large twisted piece of metal jutting out of his chest, stabbing right through his shirt pocket, the pens sticking out like splinters, and into what may have been called his heart (even though everyone said he didn't have one), his main power unit.

He panicked and yanked it out, not even stopping to think that it would also pull out the vital unit until his vision started to fail and his mental processes started to slow.

"Ohhhh nooooo," he said as everything became dark, and then, "Daaamnnnn youuuuu Mother….." as his system shut down.

Suddenly, his system started back up again, and at full force. His ears rang, his eyes started to burn, and the circuits throughout his body zapped and sizzled like they were being fried. After a minute, the unpleasant sensation subsided, and was replaced with one of euphoric clarity, like that of waking up out of a coma. He was running on a unit that he never knew he had, and one that was a hundred times as efficient and powerful as his old one, which he now let float out of his grasp.

He felt great. He felt unstoppable. But he also felt anxious and somewhat ashamed, because not only was this new system releasing greater power, it was also releasing memories…

Just when Delete was beginning to prepare a eulogy, Buzz exclaimed, "There he is!"

On their screen they saw him hailing them. He looked terrible, cut up and bald like he was, but all they cared about was that he was alive and that way. They had use the vacuum tube to bring him aboard, hoping that he wouldn't kick them all the way across the room.

Much to their grateful surprise, he simply grunted, got up, and, holding a hand over the hole over his chest so they couldn't see, said, "Come on, we don't have much time."

As he walked over to the command center, Delete said, "Boss, don't you want take care of all those cuts, first? They look like they hurt."

"Just get me some bandages for now." the Hacker said, "They don't hurt too badly, but thanks for asking."

That made Delete stop dead in his tracks. His mouth flapped open and shut a few times before he managed to say, "Boss, did you just say, 'Thanks?'"

"Yes. Why?" he then thought a moment, "Oh. Right."

The bots glanced at each other, and Buzz asked, "Uh, Boss, you sure you didn't get hurt anywhere, um, important?" He carefully skirted around the phrase, "like your head."

Now in front of his seat, the Hacker turned around, his cape swishing and his wound unwittingly exposed for his henchmen to see, "Yes I have, and thank goodness I did."

The bots just stared at the wound for a moment before he realized what they were doing and said, "Don't just stand there. We've got work to do!"

"But—" Delete couldn't stop staring at the loose wires that were peering from the floppy patch of exo-skin.

"Just please get me some bandages and don't worry about it now. It's not important," he turned away from them, "I've got to knock Motherboard out of power, and this time, I've got to do it right!"

* * *

Motherboard was perfectly fine, showing almost now sign of having experienced a near scrambling or a nearby explosion except for that she had slightly more static than usual. Dr. Marbles had already been teleported in to inspect the damaged and would soon be making calls to Symmetrian repairmen he knew would fix the glass to perfection.

"I'm glad you're alright, Motherboard," Inez said.

"I thank you, but I'm afraid it's not over, not by far."

"What do you mean?"

"I sense—" a piece of virus-induced static cut in, but it seemed more to Inez like she purposely cut herself off, "Did you see where Hacker went?"

All the kids and Digit shook their heads. Matt said, "All we saw was that he's gone from here."

"Yeah," Digit added, "Hopefully gone from Cyberspace, if you know what I mean."

Jackie wanted to reprimand him, but she couldn't, since she was in full agreement with him. It was, after all, very hard not to prefer that the person who they had spent most of their time here fighting against would just disappear.

* * *

Things in Cyberspace were, for the most part, quiet after that. Uneasy to be sure, as most cyborgs were still shaken up from the near-victory of the Scramblatron, especially after they had heard of the extensive repairs Motherboard was having to go through due to the explosion, and even more so when they found her to be dodging the question or simply vague when asked as to whether she believed the Hacker was really dead or not. Still, over two weeks had past without any incident, so things were slowly starting to return back to normal.

Except in Happily Ever After, where Wicked, upon hearing everyone celebrating the presumed demised of Public Cyber Enemy Number One, started launching random hexes at the citizens, then collapsed and started wailing for hours, and kept alternating between the two for the next week or so. Fortunately for the site, she eventually grew tired of throwing the hexes and settled for simply wailing nonstop. For that, everyone was advised to wear earplugs.

The earplugs were so effective, and everyone had become so used to the witch's unpredictable behavior, that most didn't even notice when her castle had become suddenly quiet one night. They also didn't notice the soft sparks of wheat-colored light oozing out the windows, the kind of light the was typically emitted from a type of spell she hadn't used in a long time, that of a healing incantation, in particular one used for painlessly stitching up pesky lacerations.

They did notice, however, when she started going back out into public again, mostly because she seemed much more serene than she normally did, and that she was missing her wand.


End file.
